One could argue the wisdom of tackling a remake of one of the best known romantic stories of English Renaissance literature. After all, there’s only two ways to really go about it without digging your own grave, so to speak – you do it the way it’s always been done, or you had damn well better understand it inside and out if you’re going to change it. Studio Gonzo has taken the latter, loftier road, with mixed results.
It’s not as if they lack credentials – one only has to consider their inspired reboot of The Count of Monte Cristo to be convinced that if anyone could do William Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, it would be them. A little sadly however, the changes Gonzo have brought to bear on this classic don’t work nearly as brilliantly as those they applied to Gankutsuou. This version, Romeo x Juliet, lacks the impact of the original story – at least for the duration of the first DVD collection. With its revenge saga sub plot and its good versus evil overtones, its magic trees and its ‘the future of all mankind’ implications, there’s a lot – perhaps too much – going on, and this does detract from what is supposed to be the main attraction – the love story.
Juliet (and far be it from me to insist upon gender conventions) is the orphaned heiress to the ‘good’ house of Capulet, forced to go into hiding for fourteen years after the eeeevil Prince Leontes Montague slaughters her family and nearly all their servants and retainers one dark, stormy night. She grows up in the wings of a theatre run by the flamboyant playwright Willy (yes, that Willy), dresses as a boy, dates other girls and rights wrongs for the poor people of Neo Verona in the guise of masked crusader, The Red Whirlwind. And yet, the second she puts up her sword, lets her hair down (how the hell she fits it all under that little wig, I have no idea) and slips on a dress, she apparently turns into a, well, girl. This is a bit disappointing. Seriously, if you’d been raised to be brave and strong and capable, only to be reduced to blushing, tripping and fleeing every time your number one crush appeared, you’d probably find yourself wondering whether you couldn’t just go get a vaccination or something. But not Juliet. Because this, folks, is love, and love makes… well, the saying is fools, but I’m thinking more along the lines of helpless whining morons of us all.
I know; too harsh, right? After all, it’s probably fair to say this is a minor irritation at best, easily ignored in light of Gonzo’s gorgeous animation and lovely character designs, and the music is great and the action is electric, but by revamping something that was pretty much perfect to start with, the creators have perhaps missed both the point and their chance. If Juliet had been a little more like, say, Le Chevalier D’Eon’s Lia de Beaumont, or even Real Mayar from Mangalobe’s Ergo Proxy, they perhaps would have had something truly, breathtakingly original on their hands. Instead they seem to have understood the romance part, but not the tragedy.
One of the main morals of the original Romeo and Juliet was not about the foolishness of youth or the magical first blush of love, but about how the blindness of those with the wisdom to know better leads to terrible waste (seriously, do I have to start quoting from the play?). There’s less of that in Gonzo’s retelling than perhaps there should be; originally the two families were equal but Prince Montague has taken care of that niggly little problem already and Juliet’s reasons for not being with Romeo instead include a) “his father will kill me”, and b) “I will kill his father, and should probably kill him too just in case he’s like his father”. So, in the end, if the lovers die (and this is definitely not a given at this point), it will surely be fighting injustice, overthrowing tyranny and restoring peace and balance to the fine city of Neo Verona, and not accidentally through sad and desperate circumstance because their parents weren’t listening and no one cared that they were in love.
Obviously, this is not a series for the purists, or even someone who really dug Baz Luhrmann’s musical extravaganza version, or West Side Story, or a dozen other star-crossed lovers’ adaptations, from Romeo Must Die to High School Musical. Maybe, if Gonzo had wanted to tell a tragic tale of doomed love, they should have just taken inspiration from, rather than ridden the coat tales of, Shakespeare’s timeless and still affecting play. They’ve set themselves up for brilliance and fallen a little short, neither properly hitting the mark of the original nor making of it something truly new and unique. We know the heights of animated entertainment they’re capable of, and yet Romeo x Juliet hovers around the almost mediocre, and that, perhaps, is a greater tragedy than even Willy could have penned.